1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an enterprise system having a plurality of artifacts, and in particular, to an enterprise system having a “smart distance” between the plurality of artifacts, and an apparatus and method for providing the “smart distance” among the artifacts.
2. Description of the Related Art
The pervasive connectivity of the Internet, coupled with an increasing distribution of organizations, are introducing profound changes in the way enterprises are set up and operated and are intensifying the forces within and across enterprises. To remain competitive in this environment, organizations need to move fast and quickly adapt to business-induced changes. An organization must be able to sense the salient information, transform it into meaningful, quality business metrics, respond by driving the execution of business decisions into operational systems, and finally track the results against actions and expectations.
In parallel with this trend, there have been interesting developments in the fields of Intelligent Agents and Distributed Artificial Intelligence (DAI), notably in the concepts, theories and deployment of intelligent agents as a means of distributing computer-based problem solving expertise. Intelligent agents are well suited to the emerging character of the adaptive enterprise in which the distributed operations must be orchestrated into a synchronous flow.
There have been arguments or efforts to use agents or business objects to construct adaptive systems or enterprises. For example, one such effort addresses the issue of how to build agents that function effectively in “adaptive intelligent systems” (AISs) that vary dynamically along dimensions like task requirements, different resources, contextual conditions, and performance criteria. In that effort, it was argued that an agent must adapt several key aspects of its behavior to dynamic situations such as its perceptual strategy, its control mode, its choices of reasoning tasks to perform, its choices of reasoning methods for performing those tasks, and its meta-control strategy for global coordination of all of its behavior.
However, the state of the art of artificial intelligence has not reached to a stage such that an adaptive system can be operated effectively without the involvement of human beings. Therefore, despite various efforts in studying object-oriented or agent-oriented adaptive enterprises, there are no working systems being widely used in practice.